


Dust to Dust

by saltandbyrne



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, Ashes Scene in Avengers: Infinity War Part 1, Character Death, Domestic, F/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Post-Coital, Sad Ending, poor frank
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-20 10:21:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14892806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltandbyrne/pseuds/saltandbyrne
Summary: They’ve been doing this going on a year now, but it still shocks him how beautiful Karen is when she’s undone.(Mild spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War, kind of?).





	Dust to Dust

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so sorry.

They’ve been doing this going on a year now, but it still shocks him how beautiful Karen is when she’s undone. 

Not that she isn’t stunning when she’s put together.  Neatly tucked and curled and coordinated, the demure face Karen offers the world is gorgeous in its own way.  She likes blues, cool tones like flinty armor, her careful femininity as much anonymous protection as the body armor Frank had worn before.  Before all the bad things, before Frank’s life was nothing but blood and bruises and heartbreak.  Those things aren’t healed.  Shit like that doesn’t heal, it just knits back together like a snake that’s lost its tail.  But those things were also before Karen, and that is the sole solace he can find on the nights when the old wounds start to ache.

Frank understands faces.  Shit, he spray-paints a skull on his chest and blacks out the heavy-hitter juts of his cheekbones as often as not.  When she’s not looking, Frank watches her put on her face for the day.  Nothing much, just some stuff on her skin that dampens down the freckles that glow on her cheeks when she’s bare-faced and singing beneath him, some mascara, a little blush.  In a moment of reckless curiosity, he’d read the label on her favorite lipstick.  Coral Wreath.  Like a mermaid queen or one of those chicks from the Odyssey who sang sweet enough to lure sailors to their deaths. 

Frank could drown in her.

Her apartment’s a third-floor walk-up but she’s beach-glistening with sweat, sweet beads of it on her forehead that he’ll kiss off before they’re done.

They’ve been fucking for a good hour.  Some days Karen comes home soft, nights for Chinese takeout and the old episodes of the Twilight Zone they both secretly love, and some days Karen comes home hard, whetted on the horror of some truth she’s unearthing with bare hands and bared teeth from the muck of this city.  She’s furious, as fierce and beautiful on top of him as something that could sing you into bashing your head against the rocks.

Karen has secrets.  All her powder and blush, her pressed pencil skirts and her stockings, Frank sees them for what they are.  An anchor.  Karen carries things that would break most men in half.  A dead brother, a burning heap of metal on some backwoods Vermont road, a man and a gun and the blood you can never truly wash off your hands. 

Frank can carry her secrets, keeps them tucked close to his chest along with his own.  They have that in common, at least.  Karen keeps her composure as rigid and sealed as a tomb.  Frank’s so broken open he wonders if there’s even a limit to what he can carry anymore.  Maybe that’s why she keeps him around.  What’s a sea queen without the fathomless depths of the men who’d gladly die for her?

He knows her secrets but there’s still things she doesn’t tell him.  Something’s got her angry, the kind of righteous fury that gets his back scratched up good and his jaw aching sore before she’s done with him.  That’s fine.  Frank doesn’t need all of her.  It’s better this way, their mutual agreement to leave a few stones unturned, to steer away from the shoals of the past or the straits of the present.

Frank doesn’t ask why.  He doesn’t need to when she’s like this, her reef-sharp mouth kissed blood-red, her face shining with exertion and her third orgasm, her eyes gleaming sea-glass blue as she rides him to the finish.

If Frank can truly love anything anymore, he loves her.

She likes to wear his shirts after they fuck.  It delights him more than he’ll ever say, seeing those long three-point layup legs peeking out bare for him, her slim shoulders drowning in the echo of his own bull-necked frame.  She’s tiny and unbreakable as she kisses him and saunters off to the kitchen.  There’s no rosé for Karen.  She’s a beer drinker, salt of the earth.  Frank grins as he hears her crack two open.  He tugs on his boxers and follows her.

Leaning against the counter, she hands him a cold one before taking a sip of her own.  Frank just stares, bewitched as always by the sight of her taking a sip of her beer, easy in the sky-blue of his button-down and the quiet domesticity of her small kitchen.  He’d been desperate the first time she’d let him in, and the shock still lingers every time.  That she lets him into her home, into her bed, into her life.  Frank’s a black mark of a man but somehow, she can wash it all away.

“What?” she teases, rolling her eyes indulgently as he stares at her.

“You’re beautiful.”

It’s the truth.  That’s all she’s ever asked of him.

She smiles, her teeth as bright as pearls, her eyes alight, something brilliant on the tip of her tongue until there’s a crash of glass.

It all happens at once – her eyebrows knit together, she turns to her outstretched hand, her beer hits the floor with a crash, Frank’s rushing toward her as the sharp smell of one of her fancy IPAs fills his nose.

“Frank?”

Karen’s arm is … it’s disappearing, flaking away to nothing faster than Frank can grab it.  Frank grabs her elbow just to feel his fist close around silt.

“Karen!”

She reaches for him, a rain of ash blanketing his back as her other arm turns to dust around him.  Holding what he can, they stagger down, her legs two piles of sand beneath them.   _No, no, no._

“Frank, I…”

Frank’s kneeling in broken glass when he kisses her crumbling face.  Her lips are solid for one precious moment, bittersweet and coral pink as Frank clutches at the last true ember of happiness in his life.

As sirens start to wail through the broken spine of his city, Frank screams her name into a fistful of dust and ashes.

Someone will pay for this.

 


End file.
